Category Archives: Research

When it comes to climate, the latest news for my lifelong hometown of New Orleans is not very good at all. As many people know — and as Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed made quite clear in 2005 — much of the Crescent City sits below sea level, which is why the city’s levees and its other defense mechanisms such as flood pumping stations are so critical. When [...]

Two of my passions in life, when it comes to recreation, are sailing and deep-sea diving. So, as you could imagine, the health of the world’s oceans is very important to me. Unfortunately, the medical report on the planet’s oceans has not been too good lately. Too much garbage has been dumped in our waters for too long — and the stunning result of that has been a massive slick [...]

There’s no doubt, at this point, that something of enormous consequence is happening with the planet and our climate. You could probably feel it in the air, if you lived in one of the parts of the United States that just went through a record-warm winter. Of course, it’s always important to note that weather is not the same thing as climate, but those record highs along the Eastern Seaboard [...]

Do you think that you had a bad year in 2015? I can almost guarantee that economically, it wasn’t as bad as it was for BP, the British oil giant behind the worst oil spill in American history. This week, BP officially it announced its earnings for the quarter and for the year — but the term “earnings” is something of a misnomer. Indeed, the Big Oil icon lost a [...]

You didn’t have to live in the Northeastern United States to be in thrall of the big blizzard this weekend. The massive coastal storm brought near-record snowfall totals to New York City and Philadelphia, caused coastal flooding on a scale not seen since Superstorm Sandy more than three years ago, and wreaked havoc on air, train, and car travel up and down the eastern half of the United States. Blizzards [...]

The story broke last year, and it quickly became the environmental scandal of the decade: Evidence that the world’s largest oil company knew for decades that climate change — driven largely by fossil-fuel pollution — would cause catastrophic damage to Planet Earth if left unchecked. It seemed almost too cynical to believe that Exxon Corp., the massive forerunner to today’s ExxonMobil, would chose a dishonest policy of lying about its [...]

More than four-and-a-half years later, the devastated Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan continues to send out the warning signs of just how bad the 2011 meltdown at the site truly has been. After all this time — not to mention all this distance — scientists continue to find radiation from the Japanese plant, which was devastated first by a major earthquake and then the subsequent tsunami, assaulting the Pacific [...]

In 2010, I was part of an alliance of environmentalists and others who pleaded with the federal government to work with BP in ending the widespread use of the toxic chemical called Corexit. This dangerous substance was being sprayed, in large quantities, to make the crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe disappear. It seemed clear from Day One that simply spraying another poisonous chemical on top of the more [...]

For years, the debate over climate change happened largely at an academic level that wasn’t always easy for the general public to understand. While scientists studied global temperature data and closely tracked the level of carbon pollution in the atmosphere, the impact on the ground seemed a little less clear. For every unseasonably warm winter here in parts of the United States, there were also record-setting blizzards, and warnings that [...]

Think about 1977. If you’re even old enough to remember, that was a long, long time ago. It was 38 years ago, to be exact. I was a teenager working toward my GED in New Orleans — law school and my career as an environmental attorney was still ahead of me. The city’s NBA basketball team was still the Jazz, not the Pelicans. Jimmy Carter had just been elected president [...]

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